“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.

Britain Shivers In October

I will admit that I am quick to pick on the UK Met Office when they get something wrong. So, in all fairness, I will have to point out that they got their forecast right for October (well almost!), when they said it would be “slightly colder and drier than normal”. In the event, rainfall was bang on average and it was a lot colder than normal, but, hey, beggars can’t be choosers!

Anyway, back to the numbers. UK mean temperature for the month was 8.2C, which was 1.3C colder than average, and makes it the coldest October since 1993 and the 7th coldest in the last 50 years.

November has started even colder still, and on the CET index, the YTD is now only 0.19C warmer than the 1961-90 baseline. However this baseline is about 0.5C cooler than the 1981-2010 baseline the Met Office uses. Therefore, against the latter, we are running at roughly 0.3C colder for the year, despite a mild start to it.

The current 3-month outlook provided by the Met is for slightly below average temperatures and average rainfall. If they are right, this year will be the second coldest since 1996, beaten only by the exceptionally cold year of 2010

Related

Not only that, but according to RSS figures for October, the temperature anomaly for the Continental U.S.A. was down from +0.276c in September, to -0.58c in October.
That means the USA anomaly as fallen by 3.875c since the peak in March.
No doubt all part of “global weirding”.

In October 2010, the 12 month rolling average CET fell below the 1961-90 average of 9.47c for the first time since Feb. 1997. It reached a low of 8.85c for the year ending December 2010, the lowest it had been since March 1987.
Afterwards, it rose, reaching 10.85c in January 2012, but has since fallen again, and is currently standing at 9.66c.
If November remains at 5.2c and subsequent months are normal, the 12 month average will fall below the 1961-90 average again in January 2013.